Spring 2022 Class Schedule: Department of English

Spring 2022 Class Schedule

**Meeting days and times may be subject to change.**

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Lee	WF 11-12:20
English 202 Introduction to Creative Writing Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Webster	MW 12:30-1:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Betts	MW 2-3:20
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Smith, K.	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Tucker	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Martinez	MW 11-12:20
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Bouldrey	MW 12:30-1:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Seliy	MW 2-3:20
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Stielstra	TTh 11-12:20
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.
English 213	Introduction to Fiction	Johnson	TTh 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 213 Introduction to Fiction Course Description: What is fiction? What is fiction for? What is the relationship between fictional worlds and the real one? These are the questions that we will explore in this class. Reading both essential works of fiction and important theories of fiction, we will seek to understand the construction and purpose of these other literary worlds, as well as the social and political importance of reading this world otherwise. Teaching Method(s): lecture with required TA-led discussion section. Evaluation Method(s): Short essay, midterm exam, final exam, quizzes and participation. Texts include: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad. Texts will be available at: Bookends & Beginnings, 1716 Sherman Avenue.
English 270-2	American Literary Traditions, Part 2	Grossman & Stern	MW 12-12:50, plus discussion section
English 270-2 American Literary Traditions, Part 2 Course Description: This course is the second part of a survey of American literature covering the decade preceding the Civil War to 1900. In lectures and discussion sections, we shall explore the divergent textual voices--white and black, male and female, poor and rich, enslaved and free--that constitute important strands of the literary tradition of the United States in the nineteenth century. Central to our study will be the following questions: What does it mean to be an American in 1850, 1860, 1865, and beyond? Who speaks for the nation? How do the tragedy and the triumph of the Civil War inflect American poetry and narrative? And how do post-bellum writers represent the complexities of democracy, particularly the gains and losses of Reconstruction, the advent of and resistance to the "New Woman," and the class struggle in the newly reunited nation? Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section. Evaluation Method: Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all sections is required. Texts may include: Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street"; Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills"; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Emily Dickinson, selected poems; Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” and other selected poems; Charles Chestnut, selected tales; Kate Chopin, The Awakening. Note: English 270-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for non-majors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.
English 275	Intro to Asian American Literature (ICSP)	Huang	TTh 9:30-10:50, plus discussion section
English 275 Intro to Asian American Literature (ICSP) Course Description: Asian American, Asian-American, Asian/American: from Chinese Americans to Hmong Americans to mixed race Asian Americans, from fourth-generation Californians to cosmopolitan college students, from desert internment camps to New York City office buildings, what do the many subjects and locations of Asian American literature tell us about the capaciousness of the category itself? This class has two goals—first, providing an overview of literature written by Asian Americans in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and placing these texts in conversation with key concepts from Asian American culture and history. Second, interrogating the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of Asian American identity, a category that came into use only in the 1960s as a coalitional entity defined by shared histories of labor, discrimination, and national and cultural unbelonging. Teaching Method(s): Lecture, Discussion Evaluation Method(s): Regular reading responses; two short essays; one long essay; active class participation Texts (subject to change; please confirm final text list on Canvas before purchasing): David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (ISBN 978-0452272590) Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (ISBN 978-157322531) Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (ISBN 978-0679721888) Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (ISBN 978-1566894869) Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at the Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available in a course packet available at Quartet Copies.
English 277	Intro to Latina/o Literature (ICSP)	Cuate	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 277 Intro to Latina/o Literature (ICSP) Course Description: This course will introduce students to major Latina/o/x authors, genres, and movements by exploring a diverse corpus of literary texts. We will take a historical approach, examining how Latinx writers from various communities (Puerto Rican, Mexican American, Cuban American, Dominican American, Colombian American) have understood their relationship to the United States from the late nineteenth century up to the present. We will also question the category of Latinx. How do the experiences and histories of the various groups described under that label benefit from and/or resist identification as a single ethnicity? Most importantly, we will ask what poetry, memoirs, and novels have to offer as a way of understanding Latinx experiences. By the end of the quarter students will have an overview of the heterogeneous literary voices and aesthetics that constitute US Latinx literature. Teaching Method: Seminar/Discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance, class participation, readings, writing assignments, presentations final paper. Texts may include: Vida by Patricia Engel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sánchez. Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez Poetry, essays, and short stories by Urayoán Noel, Elizabeth Acevedo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra María Esteves, among others. Texts will be available at Norris Bookstore and via Canvas.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Desire, Demons, and Ghosts: Literary and Historical Possessions	Taylor	MW 2-3:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Desire, Demons, and Ghosts: Literary and Historical Possessions Course Description: What does it mean to be possessed by a divine or demonic spirit, another person, or the past? In this course, we will explore possession as a nexus for crucial questions that literature stages regarding autonomy and ownership, gender and sexuality, and national and personal identity. Beginning with classical mythology and the divine frenzy that Plato writes possesses good poets, we will then investigate more threatening spectacles of possession, including William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and selections from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon (1952), the story of a famous reported demonic possession at a French convent. We will go on to study the possessions and hauntings staged in Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). The course concludes by studying what it means to be denied self-possession by another person, society, or the legacy of a haunting past in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), James Baldwin’s essays, and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2008). These texts invite analysis of the dynamics of possession between the individual and society, lover and beloved, and past and present; each also invites inquiry into how possession informs what it means to read, write, or claim ownership of a narrative. Throughout the course, students will develop analysis and argumentation skills through writing and revising essays on different literary genres. Students will also learn how we can interpret texts in conjunction with major schools of thought in literary criticism and theory. Note: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Polar Literatures	Botz	TTh 2-3:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Polar Literatures Course Description: Polar spaces at once delineate and defy our Anthropocenic imaginary. As climate catastrophe alters our relationship to the edges of conventional maps, the immense scale and distance of the North and South Poles have long inspired imaginations across the globe, even as they test the limits of our attention as well as our capacity for action. What do human representations of polar spaces tell us—south of the Arctic and north of the Antarctic—about our relationship to space, environment, and climate? In this course, we will explore the most prominent of Polar genres, the travel narrative, to better understand how these places shape, and are shaped by, our political, aesthetic, and ethical understanding. Examining the sublime appeal of icy solitude figured in Romantic poetry and modern science fiction, working with archival materials of failed Victorian expeditions, and reading Inuit novels memorializing ways of life threatened by outside intrusions, we will consider the power of various narrative mediums and technologies to cultivate care for the distant, the invisible, and the potentially catastrophic. By investigating how our cultural conceptions of ice have evolved over time, we will come to appreciate how narrative is turned to, time and again, to render the far away nearby, as well as learn how we might more effectively take up narrative now as these climes face crisis. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: Short writing assignments and final (group or individual) creative project. Texts Include: Tete-Michel Kpomassie, An African in Greenland; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, Sanaaq; Yuri Rutkheu, When the Whales Leave; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth; and selections by Edmund Burke, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Ada Blackjack, Gwendolyn MacEwan, and Apsley Cherry-Gerrard. Available at: Norris; additional readings available through Canvas. Note: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.
English 302	The History of the English Language (Pre-1830)	Breen	MW 11-12:20
English 302 The History of the English Language (Pre-1830) Course Description: Have you noticed that, unlike many other languages, English often has two different names for the same animal? These double names can be traced back to 1066, when the French-speaking Normans, led by William the Bastard, conquered England and installed their countrymen in positions of power. In the aftermath of this victory, William the Bastard became William the Conqueror and cows and pigs and sheep became beef and pork and mutton – at least when they were served up to the Normans at their banquets. Like many other words associated with aristocratic life, these terms all derive from French. In this course we will investigate this and many other milestones in the history of the English language, focusing on the period from the early middle ages through the eighteenth century. We will pay particular attention to the relationships among “high” and “low” forms of language, including efforts to elevate the status of English and the dynamics of self-consciously “low” registers of language such as slang and obscenity. In addition to offering an introduction to the linguistic, literary, and social history of England, this course will help you to develop a more sensitive understanding of modern English that you can bring to other classes and to life in general. Teaching Methods: Mostly discussion, some lecture. Evaluation Methods: Midterm and final examinations, paper, short written exercises, oral presentation. Texts may include: Tore Janson, The History of Languages, ISBN 978-0-19-960429-6, plus readings and videos posted to Canvas
English 307	Advanced Fiction Writing: What Happens Next? Structure, Plot, and Suspense in Short Fiction	Kokernot	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 307 Advanced Fiction Writing: What Happens Next? Structure, Plot, and Suspense in Short Fiction Course Description: You can write a beautiful sentence, bust out of the gate with an enticing premise, and clairvoyantly reveal your character’s rich interior life to say something profound about the human condition---but at some point your story loses momentum and fizzles out. Answering the simple question of “What happens next?” is a powerful impulse that drives us as readers, and it should likewise, drive us as writers. Learn to grow your brilliant ideas into tense, invigorating stories. Put your beautiful sentences to work in the service of plot and character. And dive deep into a character during moments of conflict. Students will explore structure, plot, and suspense through a variety of interdisciplinary, playful writing exercises that employ visual media and also other texts, encouraging spontaneity while adhering to constraints of form. Be prepared to write at least one full-length story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Textbooks Will Include: Thrill Me by Benjamin Piercy. PDFs of short stories and excerpts from longer texts available on Canvas.
English 309	Advanced Creative Writing: The Art of Obsession	Mun	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 309 Advanced Creative Writing: The Art of Obsession Course Description: Much of writing is made up of obsessions. We might use our obsession as catalyst and fuel, something that gets us writing and, if lucky, keeps us writing. And sometimes we write about our obsession directly, hoping (perhaps futilely) to be purged free of it, once and for all. Susan Sontag, while talking about writing and the writer’s life, said it simply: “You have to be obsessed. It’s not something you’d want to be—it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be.” In this course we’ll explore “obsession” from two main angles: personally and textually. On the personal level, and as a way to get us started, we’ll discuss and identify subjects we keep returning to—from harmless infatuations to downright obsessions. Is Kendrick Lamar, Lizzo or the soundtrack from Mama Mia playing nonstop on your headphones, for example? Is there a painting you keep seeing in your mind’s eye? What exactly is your relationship with a well-made cheeseburger? What is the chronic conflict of your life? On a textual level, we’ll read stories, essays, and books that deal with obsession in one form or another, or reveal the linguistic obsessions the author held while writing them. Students will have the option to write a creative non-fiction essay or a short story. This class is for serious writers who are unafraid of taking real risks, unafraid of true rewrites/revisions, unafraid of working hard toward turning a good story or an essay into a great one. Teaching Method: Workshop. Evaluation Method: Creative writing assignments, peer-reviews, and reading responses, workshop participation. Text Include: Coursepack and books. Coursepack will be available at: Quartet Copies Instructor Bio: Nami Mun was raised in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. She is the author of the novel Miles from Nowhere, which received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21^st Century Award, a Hopwood Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Some of Nami’s honors include fellowships from University of Michigan, Northwestern University, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bread Loaf and Tin House. Miles from Nowhere went on to become a national bestseller. Nami’s work can be found in Granta, Tin House, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Iowa Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, among others. Previously, she has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator.
English 310	Studies in Literary Genres: Subversive Forms: Satire (Pre-1830)	Thompson	MW 11-12:20
English 310 Studies in Literary Genres: Subversive Forms: Satire (Pre-1830) Course Description: What do Jonathan Swift’s pamphlet A Modest Proposal and Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out have in common? This class examines the genre that Swift and Peele exploit to devastating effect: satire. We’ll devote special attention to satire’s key paradox: for those who get it (or think they do), satire signifies by not signifying what it literally says. We’ll explore the long history of satire to ponder its ethical concerns with social and political life; sexuality, sex work, and marriage; social class, corruption, and criminality; and empire and race. The class ends with contemporary film and TV, including Get Out and Black Mirror. Teaching method: Discussion. Evaluation method: Two short essays (5 pages); one medium essay (7 pages); intermittent Canvas posts; participation in class discussion. Required texts list: [any additional readings will be available on Canvas] Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551114798 George Gordon Byron, Don Juan. Penguin Classics. ISBN: 9780140424522 Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild. Oxford’s World Classics. ISBN: 9780199549757 John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera. Dover Thrift Editions. ISBN: 9780486408880 Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551116723 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Oxford’s World Classics. ISBN: 9780199536849
English 323-1	Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre-1830)	Phillips	TTh 11-12:20
English 323-1 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre-1830) Course Description: As we follow along the road to Canterbury, we not only hear a compendium of stories-both pious and irreverent-but we also meet a collection of characters whose diversity spans the spectrum of medieval society: a noble knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a virtuous priest, a dainty nun and a domineering wife, who compete with one other, trading insults as well as tales. Over the course of the quarter, we will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres, from chivalric romances to bawdy fabliaux, frustrating and playing upon the expectations of his audience. Against and alongside this literary context, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, asking questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, further shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales: How is a romance different, for example, when it is told by a knight, by a social climber, or by a renegade wife? We will be reading Chaucer's poem in the original Middle English. At the end of the quarter, we will give an in-class performance of one of the tales. Teaching Method(s): Discussion and some lectures. Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation required; an oral presentation; several short papers; quizzes and a midterm exam. Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $23) (The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson are also acceptable editions). Textbooks available at: Beck’s Bookstore.
English 332	Renaissance Drama (Pre-1830)	Masten	TTh 2-3:20
English 332 Renaissance Drama (Pre-1830) Course Description: We will read and analyze some of the extraordinary plays written by Shakespeare's prolific contemporaries between the beginnings of the professional London theatres around 1580 to their forced closing in 1642. We will approach these plays from literary, theatrical, and book-history perspectives; please be prepared to think across these categories. We'll read: a revenge tragedy more popular in its time than Hamlet; a history play about a king and his lower-class, immigrant boyfriend; a tragicomedy and a tragedy about incestuous siblings (one a shocking rewrite of Romeo and Juliet); two very different tragedies with women at their center (one the first original play by an English woman); a marriage anti-comedy with multiple trans* resonances; and a prematurely postmodern play where the audience seizes control of the script. These plays will help us think about theatrical genres, about the conditions of writing, performance, and printing, about modes of social organization (marriage, family, sexuality, reproduction, social class, race and ethnicity, monarchy, dynasty, nation, to name a few), about periodization ("Renaissance" or "early modern"?), and about canonicity (for example, the distinction between Shakespeare and "his contemporaries" implied by our curriculum and in the first sentence of this course description). Teaching Methods: Mini-lectures; group analysis and discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Based on participation in discussion, weekly in-class writing, papers, and a final exam. Plays: The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd), Edward II (Christopher Marlowe), Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (Ben Jonson), The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry (Elizabeth Cary), A King and No King (Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher), The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont et al.), together with some historical and critical essays. This reading list is not for the faint of heart. Text: English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (W.W. Norton). ISBN: 0-393-97655-6. [This anthology contains all but one of the plays we will read and is available new, used, and for rent.] This edition only. Text available at: TBA
English 344	18th Century Fiction: Gothic Ecologies (Pre-1830)	Botz	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 344 18th Century Fiction: Gothic Ecologies (Pre-1830) Course Description: The birth of the Gothic novel, a genre overflowing with ruined castles, misty wastelands, and sinister forests, coincided with the Industrial Revolution—an unprecedented shift in human interactions with the environment. This course will consider the development of the Gothic genre in the eighteenth century and Romantic period as a revealing glimpse into the period’s anxieties regarding humankind’s place in the natural world, largely by way of the supernatural forces writers conjured to make sense of their fears of the changing landscape. In turn, we will consider how Gothic tropes—including the monstrous, the uncanny, and the sublime—shape current ecological discourses around the Anthropocene and climate catastrophe. By reading some of the genre’s most (in)famous writers, including Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, and Emily Bronte, we will examine how the Gothic affords a distinctly ecological perspective on questions of sexuality, nationality, xenophobia, and otherness in Britain and America--then and now--as well as a means for capturing the changing, and often uncanny, relationships between the human, the non-human, and the more-than-human. Texts may include: Horatio Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest; Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; and selections by Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Nikolai Gogol.
English 357	19th Century Fiction: Madwomen in the Attic – Insanity, Gender, and Authorship in British Fiction (Post-1830)	Cogswell	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 357 19th Century Fiction: Madwomen in the Attic – Insanity, Gender, and Authorship in British Fiction (Post-1830) Course Description: The climax of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre hinges on a shocking revelation that other writers have been rereading and even rewriting ever since. Brontë’s iconic Gothic tale of “madness,” and that concept’s inflection by gender, race, and nationality, has become central to our ideas about difference. Tracing the afterlives of Brontë’s confined madwoman through twentieth-century reimaginations of the trope, including Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and recent films such as Midsommar and Hereditary, this course will examine how insanity has been seen as a category useful for regaining (and sometimes blocking) political and literary agency. Putting these texts and films in dialogue with critical responses by Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, and others, we will explore the knotty question of how madness shapes our culture’s narratives about gender and authority. Textbooks will be available at: Beck's.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Black Joy (Post-1830/ICSP)	Mann	TTh 2-3:20
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Joy (Post-1830/ICSP) Course Description: This course takes seriously the possibility and power of black happiness in an antiblack world. Drawing on the rich traditions of black feminist theory and queer of color critique, we will engage the field of contemporary black studies scholarship to understand the disruptive and world-making capacities of black joy in the present. We will engage from scholars including Kevin Quashie, Danielle Fuentes-Morgan, Jennifer C. Nash, and others to determine how and in what ways black people’s joy registers as a matter of scholarly investment. We will also consider a range of sources from the music videos of Janelle Monáe to the poetry of June Jordan and Audre Lorde, among other texts to develop and elaborate our own theories of black joy. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do theories of the body inflect notions of black joy? What is the relationship between pleasure and pain in contemporary black life and how do scholars relate this dialectic to the world beyond the body? To what extent does black happiness align with or destabilize prevailing theories of happiness in scholarly fields including affect theory and literary and cultural studies? Teaching Method(s): Seminar. Evaluation Method(s): Discussion, black board posts, 2 papers. Texts include: Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, Joan Morgan, She Begat This. Other books/authors subject to change. Texts will be available at: Online, Bookstore
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Lesbian Representation in Popular Culture (Post-1830/ICSP)	Chaskin	MW 3:30-4:50
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Lesbian Representation in Popular Culture (Post-1830/ICSP) Course Description: This class will examine lesbian representation in film and television over the last four decades. “Representation” is a tricky word in politics and media: queer communities, communities of color, and disabled communities (and those categories overlap in important ways) have pushed for more representation in film, television, the music industry, and publishing. Lesbian women have long complained of the community’s invisibility. At the same time, minoritized communities must grapple with the fact that simple representation can be a mixed bag. If the primary goal is visibility, is all representation good representation? Are lesbian villains, or lesbians who are narratively punished, still politically useful? Does the inclusion of a lesbian character (or lesbian characters) “count” if no one involved in the production of the object was themselves a lesbian? This course will explore these questions and more, discussing theoretical readings from cultural studies alongside our primary films, television, music, and print media. We will consider the difficult and derogatory tropes that are part and parcel of lesbian representation in the media, but we will engage most intensively with narratives that have attempted to expand the narrative potential of queer female life and to affirm lesbian identities—with complex results. Teaching Methods: Discussion, collaborative course building, in-class viewing of cultural objects. Evaluation Methods: Pop culture journal, presentation, final project. Texts Include: Films: Personal Best (1982); Desert Hearts (1985); The Watermelon Woman (1996); But I’m a Cheerleader (1999); Monster (2003); Pariah (2011). TV: episodes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), The L Word (2004-2009), Orange is the New Black (2013- ). Students will be asked to keep up with lesbian and queer women’s online magazines, including Autostraddle, Curve, Qwear, them., or others, based on student interest. Texts Will Be Available At: All material will be available on Canvas.
English 369	Studies in African Literature: Animal, Animism, Animality (Post-1830/TTC)	Mwangi	MW 12:30-1:50
English 369 Studies in African Literature: Animal, Animism, Animality (Post-1830/TTC) Course Description: This course focuses on the representations of animals, animism, and animality in select African texts to examine the major developments in African literatures. While discussing various theoretical statements, we will assess the place of the non-human in the African thought. We will discuss work by well-known authors (e.g., Wole Soyinka, Bessie Head, J.M. Coetzee, Abulrazak Gurnah, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o), fiction and poetry by important but neglected authors (e.g., Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi and Henry ole Kulet), and works by emergent writers who deploy animality as a trope to explore the relationship between the human and the non-human. Subtopics will include ecology, biopolitics, slavery, race, diaspora, intra-African immigration, science fiction, queerness, and ubuntu. Theoretical texts include works by Wangari Maathai, Achille Mbembe, Rosi Braidotti, Harry Garuba, Kyle White, Frantz Fanon, and Cajetan Iheka. Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, debates, role-play, and small group discussions. Evaluation Methods: Two 7-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). No final exam. Primary texts (may change): Beukes, Lauren. Zoo City. Mulholland Books; ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316267929 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316267922 Galgut, Damon. The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎1843544628; ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1843544623 Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Paradise. New Press. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1565841638 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1565841635 Habila, Helon. Oil on Water: A Novel. W. Norton & Company; ISBN-10 : 0393339645 ISBN-13 : 978-0393339642 Maathai, Wangari. Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World. ISBN-10: 030759114X; ISBN-13: 978-0307591142 Ngugi wa Thiong’o. A Grain of Wheat. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143106767 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143106760 Parkes, Nii Ayikwei. Tail of the Blue Bird. flipped eye publishing limited. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0981858430 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0981858432
English 375	Studies in Asian American Literature: Techno-Orientalism (Post-1830/ICSP)	Huang	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 375 Studies in Asian American Literature: Techno-Orientalism (Post-1830/ICSP) Course Description: Techno-Orientalism names a variant of Orientalism that associates Asians with a technological future. This seminar will explore how Techno-Orientalist tropes are used by, played with, and rewritten by Asian American authors. We will study how twentieth-century and contemporary issues of technology, globalization, and financial speculation collide with a history of yellow peril and Asian Invasion discourse, as well as how these tensions manifest in figures and tropes such as robots, aliens, and pandemics. Texts include poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and film. Teaching Method(s): Seminar-based discussions. Evaluation Method(s): Graded participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay. Texts include: Franny Choi, Soft Science (ISBN 978-1938584992) Ling Ma, Severance (ISBN 978-1250214997) Cathy Park Hong, Dance Dance Revolution (ISBN 978-0393064841) Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (ISBN 978-0307739452) Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at Norris Bookstore. All course readings besides the primary texts will be available in a course reader available at Quartet Copies.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: That 70s Feeling (Post-1830)	Jackson	MW 11-12:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: That 70s Feeling (Post-1830) Course Description: What was the Seventies, really? It seems the only consensus about the decade is that there isn’t one, aside for the noisy kaleidoscope of disco, drugs, and killer style known to popular culture. Politically, socially, and economically, however, the Seventies is seldom discussed for itself, instead conceived as the disastrous decade clearing the stage for Eighties corporatism, Reaganism, and nostalgia. This course reads deep and diversely to study this period of time as rendered and remembered. We will read and watch materials of the period as well as contemporary texts in order to ask, Why is the Seventies so difficult to summarize? How do narratives about race, class, and nation clash and diverge? What is the mood of the time and whose mood is it? What about our current period necessitates remembering the Seventies in a certain way and how does this rewrite the sense of the time for those who lived and wrote it? Possible authors and texts: Hunter S. Thompson, Jaws, Stephen King, The Salt Eaters, Joan Didion, Ishmael Reed, the Carpenters, Toni Morrison, Inherent Vice, Mad Men, Judy Blume, Gwendolyn Brooks, American Hustle, Lana Del Rey, and The Muppets.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: Environmental Justice in Black & Indigenous Women’s Literature (Post-1830/ICSP)	Černe	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 378 Studies in American Literature: Environmental Justice in Black & Indigenous Women’s Literature (Post-1830/ICSP) Course Description: While ecocriticism has not always considered the lived experience of women of color, literary texts by African American and Native American women have found ways of theorizing their own versions of environmental and spatial justice. Reading leading theorists like Rob Nixon and Edward Soja side by side with Jesmyn Ward’s post-Katrina novel Salvage the Bones (2011), Toni Jensen’s stories about oil and fracking on Indigenous lands, and poetry by Nikky Finney and Heid E. Erdrich, this class interrogates how literature can inform our understanding of environmental injustice and different types of violence. It grounds the discussion in a longer history of colonial extraction and Indigenous dispossession, racism, structural neglect, and ongoing residential segregation by discussing Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 hurricane novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and looking at Zitkala-Ša’s influential 1924 report on the settler defrauding of Osage Indians for their oil-rich lands. Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, collaborative group work. Evaluation Methods: Participation, in-class presentation, papers. Texts include: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); LeAnne Howe, Shell Shaker (2001); Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011); Toni Jensen, “Women in the Fracklands: On Water, Land, Bodies, and Standing Rock”. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore and on Canvas.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: "The Chicago Way": Urban Spaces and American Literature (Post 1830)	Savage	TTh 2-3:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: "The Chicago Way": Urban Spaces and American Literature (Post 1830) Course Description: Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city. Teaching Method: Discussion, brief lectures, guest speakers, and an optional urban tour. Evaluation Method: Class participation; brief written responses to each text; several options for papers of various lengths. Texts Include: Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street; Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make; Richard Wright's Native Son; Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago; Dan Sinker’s The Fcking Epic Twitter Quest of @mayoremanuel; Eve Ewing’s 1919: Poems. Journalism by Mike Royko and others; short fiction by Algren, James T. Farrell and others; poetry by Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others; the films The Untouchables, The Blues Brothers, and Barbershop; the graphic novel 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call. Note:* Texts will be available at Comix Revolution, 606 Davis Street.
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: Law and Literature (Post 1830/TTC)	Schwartz	MW 12:30-1:50
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Law and Literature (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. The focus will be the classical tradition, the biblical tradition, and Shakespeare who inherited both and reworked them in the early modern period. The trial of Socrates, the trial of Jesus, biblical prophecy, tragedy in Aeschylus and Shakespeare, and a modern work by Melville will be included. Our exploration will be done in the context of theories of justice, and we will read those theories alongside the literature. But we will also heed how literature itself offers elaborations of theories of justice, following their consequences both within legal frameworks and beyond, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived. Teaching Methods: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Methods: Discussion and papers. Texts include: Excerpts from Plato and Aristotle; Aeschylus, The Eumenides; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; excerpts from Rawls; Kymlicka, Political Philosophy.
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: Action Heroines: Gender, Heroism, and the Popular Imagination (Post-1830)	Taylor	MW 9:30-10:50
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Action Heroines: Gender, Heroism, and the Popular Imagination (Post-1830) Course Description: Over the past decade, an abundance of heroines has emerged in young adult literature, retellings of mythology, and, in turn, cinema. The image of a strong female lead shooting arrows, jumping off trains, and generally kicking ass, has captured the attention of readers and movie-goers, even as superhero film franchises have been slow to feature female leads. This class asks why strong heroines are popular in this cultural moment both by analyzing the novels and films that feature them, and by contextualizing them through the lens of cultural studies. We will dissect characterizations of recent popular heroines and examine how they might undermine hierarchies and norms of gender and sexuality. At the same time, our inquiry will trouble whether the current era of heroines is as subversive as it might seem. Has the recent popularity of action heroines changed the way popular culture represents the role of women and girls in society more generally? Is the heroine's journey distinct from the hero's? How might the heroine destabilize constructs of gender and sexuality? How does the role of the heroine relate to literary or movie genres? To answer these questions, our readings will engage with queer and feminist theory, masculinity studies, and film theory. Texts and films may include Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games; Kristin Cashore’s Graceling; Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity; Madeline Miller’s Circe; Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000); Wonder Woman (2017); Black Panther (2018); Captain Marvel (2019); Enola Holmes (2020).
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: The Revolution Will (Not) Be Televised: Music Documentaries (Post-1830)	Černe	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: The Revolution Will (Not) Be Televised: Music Documentaries (Post-1830) Course Description: Focused on music documentaries, this class analyzes how film, music, image, and narrative come together to tell a compelling historical and political story. We will study the nature of music documentaries’ archives, their representational techniques, and narrative points of view that shape the truth they claim to present. Comparing documentaries about three major music festivals that took place in 1969, for instance—Woodstock, Altamont, and the Harlem Cultural Festival a.k.a. ‘Black Woodstock’—we will interrogate the idea of documentaries as conveyors of historical truths and examine the alternate cultural genealogies unleashed by each film. On one level, the class explores the larger topics these documentaries bring up: pop culture and democracy, the political economy of the music industry, race and power in America, identity and the construction of stardom. On another, it considers the ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking and the genre’s ‘authenticity,’ discussing the difference between the more and less authorized gazes of cinéma verité in a Lil Wayne documentary and the self-fashioning and mythologizing of stars like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Questlove that take place on the screen or on the page. To connect course content to the local context of Chicago, the class will also include a field trip to Chess Records, the influential historic blues and R&B recording studio. Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group work. Evaluation Methods: Participation, discussion board posts, visual/textual analysis, in-class presentation, research project. Films and texts may include: Woodstock (1970), dir. Michael Wadleigh; Gimme Shelter (1970), dir. Albert and David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin; The Carter (2009), dir. Adam Bhala Lough; Searching for Sugarman (2012), dir. Malik Bendjelloul; Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove (2013), Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Ben Greenman; Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé (2019), dir. Beyoncé and Ed Burke; Miss Americana (2020), dir. Lana Wilson; Summer of Soul (…Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021), dir. Questlove. Some films might be substituted based on library access and availability; group viewings will be arranged for others. Texts and films will be available at:* Norris Bookstore and on Canvas.
English 393-3	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Betts	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-3 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 394-3	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Bouldrey	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-3 Theory and Practice of Fiction Course Description: This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get. Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 395-3	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Webster	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-3 Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An advanced year-long course in reading for writers, critical analysis of techniques of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. Reading of primary works will concentrate on longer creative nonfiction works, and the creative project for the latter part of the sequence is a work of creative nonfiction of approximately 15,000 words. A guest non-fiction writer will visit in May as writer-in-residence. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 397	Research Seminar: Modern Poetry & Poetics	Froula	TTh 11-12:20
English 397 Research Seminar: Modern Poetry & Poetics Course Description: "Make It New": Ezra Pound translated this famous slogan from an ancient Chinese inscription: "As the sun makes it new / Day by day make it new." What is "it"? What inspires poets' "making"? What makes a poem "new"? And what roles does translation play in generating new poems and poetics as the twentieth century "turns a new page in the book of the world" and opens "a startling chapter" of "world-embracing cultures" and "hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races" (Fenollosa)? These questions open broad reaches on the vast river of poetic traditions, materials, techniques, and experiences that poets navigated during the long, turbulent twentieth century, articulating poetic aims, theories, principles, and manifestos as they went. Baudelaire sings the painter of modern life; Yeats borrows from French Symbolism to launch the Celtic Revival; Eliot urges poets to cultivate a historical sense so as to discern what's new in their own moment; for William Carlos Williams, "So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens." We'll begin by studying highlights of this thrillingly generative moment in literary history to see how poems emerge in creative dialogue with other poems within and across historical moments, locales, languages, cultural surrounds, and sensibilities. We'll hone close reading, analytic, and comparative skills as we deepen our knowledge of the historical conditions that helped to shape the imaginative, formal, and linguistic virtuosity of poems-as-worlds and to enrich the resources of English poetry, from verse lines, forms, sound patterns (meter, rhythm, music, tone), diction, and figurative language to the poets’ situations, voices, addressees, and audiences. In the final weeks, working with our Humanities Bibliographer and me, students will home in on topics and design juicy, imaginative, feasible projects that combine scholarly research and literary interpretation. One for all and all for one, we'll learn to frame promising research questions; to navigate scholarly databases and archives; to gather and evaluate sources and think in dialogue with them; and to give and take constructive critique in crafting a sound, engaging, well-written essay. Teaching Methods: Seminar discussions, peer workshops, individual conferences. Evaluation Methods: Attendance, preparation, class participation; exercises (posts, peer review, in-class workshops). Each student will produce a work notebook, preliminary proposal and bibliography, annotated bibliography, working proposal and bibliography, draft(s), and a 12-15 page research paper. Texts: Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Ferguson et al. 6th edition 978-0-393-67902-1 2) William Butler Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose (Norton Critical Editions) ed. Pethica 978-0393974973; 3) Ezra Pound, TBD 4) William Carlos Williams, Spring and All 978-0811218917 5) T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. V. Eliot 978-0156948708. Recommended: Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Kolocotroni et al. 0226450740. Additional required and recommended texts via Canvas, Library Reserve, web. Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only. Students should successfully complete 4-6 300-level English courses before taking English 397.
English 422	Chaucer	Phillips	T 2-4:50
English 422 Chaucer Course Description: : From the fifteenth-century glossators to twenty-first century critics, readers of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have sought to interpret and contain this constantly shifting text. The poem poses numerous interpretative puzzles—the objects of the poem’s irony, the politics of its author, and the demographics of its intended audience, to name a few—puzzles that have been “solved” in strikingly different ways at different historical moments. This course takes as its subject the Canterbury Tales and its reception history, exploring in detail both the poem and its multiple interpretative contexts. As we read the Tales, we will consider the narratives (and narrative conventions) that Chaucer transforms and the fourteenth-century voices with whom he is in dialogue. We will investigate the ways in which the tales circulated both individually and as a collection and analyze the various paratexts that accompanied them (glosses, prologues, illustrations, and “spurious” links and tales). Along with the early publication context, we will explore current critical conversation in Chaucer Studies (as well as medieval studies more broadly) and the scholarly history to which it responds, reading the Tales through the lens of critical race studies, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and old and new historicisms. In this context, we will use the Tales to ask “Why Chaucer?,” taking up some of the recent controversies in medieval literary studies and the responses they have catalyzed.
English 431	Studies in 16th Century Literature: Political Thought in Shakespearean Contexts	Shannon	T 2-4:50
English 431 Studies in 16th Century Literature: Political Thought in Shakespearean Contexts Course Description: A Tudor idiom frames the now commonplace phrase, “the body politic.” What mythographies, theologies, theories, and ideologies built this conception of socio-political organization? While social contract theory would soon reach new predominance (ie with Thomas Hobbes in the 17thC and rising 18thC claims about the foundational role of consent to government), what models preceded it? What claims and values justified the apparent organicism of a faith or reliance on the human body as an allegory for political authority? How do these approaches manage qualities like gender, age, or illness that might trouble the allegory? This seminar will consider some key texts in early English political thought, beginning with the Tudor court case from which the phrase “the body politic” is mainly cited, and proceeding then to materials from the unsettling events of the English Reformation that address the question of obedience to the secular power (ie Thomas More’s Utopia, William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, Thomas Cranmer’s homilies from the first decade of the English church) and to anatomical and medical materials (like Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helthe and Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia). From this groundwork, we will move on consider early modern English debates about royal authority, including the ideological disarray triggered by the historical facts of a female monarch and of rebellion as treason (ie John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, selected speeches given by Elizabeth I, James I’s The Law of Free Monarchy, and John Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates). To explore these dynamics in the context of theater (then the largest assemblages of people into “bodies”), the seminar will delve into several Shakespeare plays (from among Henry IV 1&2, Richard II, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and most particularly Measure for Measure) to assess the proposition that Shakespeare — among his other forms of attention — was also a political theorist.
English 455	Studies in Victorian Literature: Literatures of the Global 19th Century: The Nahda	Johnson	Th 2-4:50
English 455 Studies in Victorian Literature: Literatures of the Global 19th Century: The Nahda Course Description: This course is an introduction to Arabic literary production of the long nineteenth century as it engages the “nahḍa” (awakening), understood variously as a discourse on modernity, a utopian social project, and an epistemological rupture wrought by colonialism and capitalism. With special emphasis on the genealogies, practices, and problematics of Arabic literary modernity, this course will introduce students to the major works of Arabic literature produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and to the major debates, social changes, and material developments that attend the period, including (but not limited to) language reform, migration, print capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism. In short, we will try to understand how these authors, through their texts, both produced and theorized modernity for their readers in the localized contexts of Imperial influence and control on the one hand, and the global–though uneven–nineteenth-century processes of social, political, economic, and technological change. Primary texts will all be available in English translation and will include: Rifa’ al-Tahtawi, The Extraction of Gold from Paris (1826); Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg (1855); Khalil al-Khuri, Oh No! I Am Not a European (1858); Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, What Isa ibn Hisham Told Us (1907); Ameen Rihani, The Book of Khalid (1911); and Jurji Zaydan, Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt (1914).
English 465	Studies in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Race, Caste, Colorism	Brueck & Wilson	Th 10a-12:50p
English 465 Studies in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Race, Caste, Colorism Course Description: Taking W.E.B. Du Bois’s proclamation that the “color line [is] the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” as a cue, this graduate seminar examines and engages Afro-Asian critique as a way to interrogate the world-systems of race, caste, and colorism as they are routed through, and inform the political landscapes, of the U.S. and South Asia. By underscoring the limits and possibilities of disciplinarity, the seminar explores the ways the overlapping histories of Blacks and South Asians necessitate new modes of critical analysis, knowledge production, and artistic creation to imagine alternative socialities. As such, course material will cover works ranging from the rhetoric and speeches (of B. R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King), aesthetic statements on color (Perumal Murugan and Zora Neal Hurston), political manifestos (the Black Panther Party and the Dalit Panthers), as well as art (A/Nil and Casteless Collective). Note: This course is colisted with ASIAN LC 492 and is cotaught by Professors Laura Brueck and Ivy Wilson.
English 471	Studies in American Literature: 19th Century Women Writers	Spigner & Stern	W 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: 19th Century Women Writers Course Description: This course will explore the autobiographical fictions, slave narratives, serialized tales, memoirs, novels, and poems produced by African American women from the antebellum period through the turn of the twentieth century, and ending with Zora Neale Hurston’s 1927 reflection on the life of the last former slave brought to the United States from Africa in 1862. We will begin the course and introduce these literary accounts with recordings and written transcripts of selected WPA interviews of former slaves by largely white interlocutors working for the Roosevelt Administration. By exploring the variety of writing, from travel and slave narrative and to fiction, this course will consider the forms and content produced by Black women during the nineteenth century and raise questions concerning at least: shifting political and social identities, authorship, proto-Black feminism, and the possibilities and limitations of the Black woman “archive” versus a “canon.” Course materials will include Mary Prince, The Slave Narrative of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831); Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman’s Narrative (n.d. 1850s); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); Julia Collins, The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride (1865); Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; 30 Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868); Alice Dunbar Nelson, Confessions of a Lazy Woman (~1903); Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902-1903); and Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (unpub. 1927/2018). Professors Spigner and Stern will also distribute poems written by Black women across the course of the quarter to supplement our discussion of 19thcentury Black women’s prose works. Each seminar participant will be required to give a presentation and lead the class for the fi rst hour of the seminar. Participants will also produce several short, argument-based reflection papers. Final projects will enable students to feature their own research interests in creative installations involving literary texts, historical documents, cinematic or televisual materials and artifacts from the popular culture of the 19th century. Professors Spigner and Stern will consult with all seminar participants on their topics for the final project. Required Texts: Mary Prince, The Slave Narrative of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831) 2001 Penguin Edition ISBN: 978-0140437492 Electronic version: https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/prince/prince.html Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman’s Narrative (n.d. 1850s) 2016 Warner Books Edition ISBN: 978-0446690294 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) 2010 Signet Classic Reissue Edition ISBN: 978-0451531469 Electronic version: https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html Julia Collins, The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride (1865) 2006 Oxford University Press Edition ISBN: 978-0195301601 Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; 30 Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868) 2016 Eno Publishers Reissue Edition ISBN: 978-0989609272 Alice Dunbar Nelson, Confessions of a Lazy Woman Electronic version (only): pdf available through Canvas Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902-1903) 2004 Washington Square Press Edition ISBN: 978-0743467698 Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (unpub. 1927/2018). 2020 Amistad Reprint Edition ISBN: 978-0062748218
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Affective Turns	Jackson	M 2-4:50
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Affective Turns Course Description: This course serves as an introduction to affect theory. In concert with a long-view study of philosophies of emotion, feeling, and embodiment, readings will focus on charting out the various interpretative methods, disciplines, and debates constitutive of what’s been dubbed “the affective turn”; this alongside practicing readings of fiction. Possible readings: Aristotle, Ralph Ellison, Gilles Deleuze, Toni Morrison, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, Ruth Leys, Lauren Berlant, Fred Moten, Sara Ahmed, Eugenie Brinkema.
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop	Shanahan	W 10a-12:50p
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop Course Description: In this two-quarter workshop, students will focus on creative research as a mode of poetic production. In the fall, we will read several research-based collections, as well as interviews, reviews, and other secondary media, discussing the formal and thematic composition of the books and investigating how the poet metabolized her research into the making of poems. We will also write to prompts generated from the collections and workshop those poems. Before the end of fall quarter, students will select a topic of their own and submit a proposal as well as a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, in service of generating a small sample of poems based on this research, due at the beginning of spring quarter. In the spring, we will focus on workshopping the poems generated in fall and winter quarters. We will workshop poems as discrete objects and part of a group, considering how the organization of poems can generate new possibilities for thematic, narrative, and affective meaning. By the end of spring, students will have drafted and revised a long, thematically unified sequence of poems (20-35 pages), which will provide the basis for their eventual thesis. Sample Reading List: Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, Catherine Barnett Seam, Tarfia Faizullah Toxic Flora, Kimiko Hahn Leadbelly, Tyehimba Jess Voyage of the Sable Venus, Robin Coste Lewis Once, Meghan O’Rourke Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith Thrall, Natasha Trethewey One Big Self, CD Wright
English 497	MFA Fiction Workshop	Martinez	W 2-4:50
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop Course Description: TBA
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Stielstra	T 2-4:50
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: TBA
English 520	Writing for Publication	Froula	W 3-4:50
English 520 Writing for Publication Course Description: Our collective goal in this workshop is to help each member prepare a scholarly article for submission by the end of the quarter. Each member will work to develop and revise a promising seminar project or a dissertation chapter for publication in article form. We'll discuss how to think about and select a suitable journal, scholarly conversation, and audience; how to fit an article's frame, argument, and rhetoric to the journal and its audience; how to identify and address any weaknesses in research, argument, structure, and style; how to decide where and how to cut and compress the argument, where and how to develop or expand it; how best to organize the article; how to write a strong, attention-catching lead; how to follow a journal's style sheet; how to check references with meticulous care; how to submit the article for publication; and how to respond to readers’ reports. We'll also consider broader issues of scholarly publication, such as pros and cons of publishing in edited volumes, special journal issues, and online venues; whether and how to publish work that forms part of a future monograph; and how scholarly publication relates to publication for a wider, non-specialist audience. One for all and all for one, we'll begin with workshop members analyzing and critiquing their own and each other’s submissions. Each will also receive readers’ reports from the instructor and, where possible, from a specialist colleague in the field. Each will work closely with the instructor and workshop members on successive drafts. "Writing for Publication" is offered P/N and open to all students in candidacy with their advisers' consent. Should demand be high, Ph D candidates in English who are nearing the job market will have enrollment priority. Teaching method: Seminar discussion and workshop.
English 571	Teaching Creative Writing	Seliy	M 10a-12:50p
English 571 Teaching Creative Writing Course Description: TBA